PR’s Top Pros Talk: Byron Calamese

Byron Calamese, Managing Director of Zeno East for Zeno Group, shares his knowledge on navigating multicultural communications in an ever-changing landscape. He highlights Zeno Group’s partnership with EGAMI Group on projects including “The Multicultural Mandate 2023” report. Byron also explains how the findings from the report can guide brands with their multicultural marketing strategies.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: While our announcer extraordinaire just shared your title. Byron, think it would be helpful if you could talk a little bit about the breadth of your role for context.

BYRON: Sure. So, I have the pleasure of leading Zeno East, which includes our New York and Washington DC offices. I’m also a member of the agency’s global leadership team, and so working with my colleagues around the world on strategies and opportunities for the future.

DOUG: Yeah, and obviously it’s part of global leadership. Multicultural communications is growing in importance. Do you have any top tip on how best to navigate that?

BYRON: For sure. You know, think that we are very focused on helping organizations, clients move from aspiration to more intentionality around multicultural communications. If you were to put 100 communicators, put 100 marketers in a room and said, do you want to do more multicultural comms, the answer would be resounding Yes. It would quickly be followed by the realities of resourcing, budget, representation, focus. And so that’s a dynamic and shift that we are very focused on evolving across our industry because we know the importance and the changing demographics and climate of our world.

DOUG: So, do you think for multicultural marketing is a key role for the industry to really focus clients and organizations on that marketplace and what some of your advice on how to best do that?

BYRON: Absolutely. There’s two things there. One, it’s we cannot overstate the opportunity. You know, as I just touched on, the US is changing, the demographics are evolving. We will be a minority majority country by 2045. And so, this is really a bottom line mandate in some ways that in order for your business to continue to grow, in order for you to continue to evolve as an organization, for many of our clients, we are very focused on how do you connect to diverse audiences in a very relevant way. And so that that’s the first part. The second part is I would say that it’s going to take a village, right? It’s not about one individual, one brand, one agency that’s going to evolve the landscape. We really need to come together as a collective to put multicultural at the center of everything that we do from a comms and business standpoint. It always gives me great pleasure in these moments to talk a little bit about our partnership with Agami. Agami is a leading multicultural agency woman owned, black owned. We formed a partnership with them about a year and a half ago around a shared purpose to really elevate cultural competency and put multicultural at the forefront of comms and Zeno is an invested partner in Agami. And so, we’re really working together with many clients to really help them resonate and be more relevant with different target audiences.

DOUG: Yeah, that’s great that you’re doing that. And it’s really interesting to me that the phrase minority majority is out there because that just shows how much further you need to come because guess what? The majority is going to be the majority and I wasn’t even a math major, but that I know there’s no such thing as a minority majority. It’s like the majority of that, which clearly should be a communications focus. You also have what you call a breadth and depth model. Can you talk about that a little bit?

BYRON: Yeah, and this really originated through our partners at Agami. They do a wonderful job in developing really strategic, relevant programs for many of their clients, in addition to the all the things that we bring to the table as well in terms of the scale. And so really the breadth of it, if we’re going to look at it from a two-tier standpoint, really focuses on total market inclusivity. It is what is your brand’s history from a DE&I standpoint, your commitments there? What do different audiences and diverse audiences think of your brand today? How relevant have you been in the past, so on and so forth. So, it’s really a cross-cultural look at all the things that an organization or brand does today. The values that they have, do they align with sort of cross-cultural audiences? The depth side of it is really going deep into one specific audience, right? And so that is if you’re trying to reach black consumers, it’s really an understanding of what’s been your commitment to the audience and the communities, to the black community, again the value side of it. What do they value? Does it align to your purpose overall? So, the two of those together, the sort of the breadth, the cross-cultural view and then the depth, the real focus on the individual audiences, sort of the secret sort of sauce and the opportunity sort of forms from that Intel and to help us really develop the right strategies to help our clients.

DOUG: Yeah. And I would also think that there’s a lot of breadth within the depth because you can’t just assume that just because some people have the same checkbox, if you will, that there’s homogeneity there, that they’re all the same is tremendous differential. How do you integrate that into your multicultural efforts?

BYRON: Yeah, it’s actually a terrific segue to the new research that we have introduced with in partnership with Agami. So it’s a Zeno and Agami collaboration, and we’re calling it the Multicultural Mandate. And to what you just touched on, a big focus of what we learned from that. We talked to 6000 Americans to really better understand and what bubble to the surface was identity and how there are dimensions to identity today. And so, I think that the real focus for us as we look at moving forward is really focusing on what do individual groups value most and how does your brand ultimately fit into what they value and I think that’s really, really important. The second part is that everything that company and organization a brand needs to do, it needs to be extraordinarily relevant to that audience. So, representation is not enough anymore, right? And that that is sort of the first step and it’s incredibly important. Of course, we want more representation across the board, but the next step from a brand standpoint to really connect to these audiences is that you have to ensure that you’re developing relevant programs, content that’s relevant, that’s not just a mass market approach, and you’re putting people of color in the ad, right? And so that that is a big focus for where the breadth and depth model and what our research is showing us is that relevance is the critical factor there to make sure that you’re resonating with those audiences.

DOUG: That’s really fascinating stuff. And you seem like a pretty hopeful person just in speaking with you. Um, does that research give you maybe more hope for the future of the industry and how so?

BYRON: I think it does. I do tend to be a glass half full type of guy. I think we will get there. It’s incremental steps as an industry at large to put more focus and emphasis on these different groups. I think technology in many ways helps us from an analytics standpoint, but also how we connect to consumers based on what they care about most, will continue to advance, and support that. I do think, though, that it requires the industry at large to really begin to think of multicultural and these audiences as not a bolt on, but as sort of core to when we think about consumer marketing of the future. Consumer marketing of the future is multicultural marketing.

DOUG: And you know, multicultural marketing might also include what some might have called the traditional majority or the past majorities that we have. It seems like everyone needs to be worked into the plan cohesively. And to your point, is this great data that can help advise us and do that and execute it. If that’s a challenge, we’re willing to take on. Any final thoughts?

BYRON: One other really important nugget that we discovered during the research, it ties to the identity part that we were talking about earlier is that we’ve really defined a new audience and the audience is a cohort, self-defined, generation self-defined. And because we live in a world where multi-ethnic and people that identify as multi-ethnic or multiracial or actually the fastest growing group within the multicultural segment, that identity and how someone sort of tells their story and how they feel, and their different experiences is really the core to the future of how we have to develop programs moving forward. So, it is, yes, we have to look at the depth within different audience, whether it’s Latinx, black, Lgbtq+, but also, we need to look at individuals that are a combination of things, right? That they’re multi-ethnic or multiracial and they have a different experience. Right? We heard in a lot of our research and our focus group individuals saying things like, you know, they are a black mom, white dad never felt I fit completely in with the black community. I never felt as though fit completely within the white community. And so, we’re how do we navigate that from some of those targets? So I’m hopeful that we’ll get there. There’s a lot of work to be done. But I think incrementally we will continue to make the steps to make it happen.

DOUG: Fascinating stuff. Thanks so much for sharing your really great insights.

BYRON: Absolutely.